How CIOs Can Help Storytellers in All Brands and Industries

I was very excited when several months ago I learned about transmedia storytelling, a concept originally developed in the entertainment industry to tell a common story on multiple media platforms by moving characters and storylines across books, films, video games, comic books, TV series and so on. The rise of social media and other digital channels makes the concept particularly powerful as a way of engaging the target audience with more depth and over a much longer period of time than would be possible within a single medium.

Beyond the entertainment industry, transmedia storytelling holds great promise to help develop a compelling brand when introducing a new and potentially disruptive offering in the marketplace. Establishing such a brand requires much more than advertising. It is akin to engaging in a conversation with your intended audience, where you talk about what’s in your mind, your aspirations, your questions, your doubts, what you know and what you don’t know. In short, you are creating and telling a story about your brand. And, the more powerful, important and complex the messages you are trying to convey, the more important it is that you do so by telling a compelling, emotionally resonant story.

There are several reasons why I find transmedia so interesting. It reminds me of collaborative innovation, one of the most important concepts that many companies in the IT industry have embraced over the past decade. It is intriguing to consider how some of the various approaches to collaborative innovation from the IT industry might apply to transmedia storytelling and branding across all industries, whether co-creating with leading-edge users, partnering with open source communities, or fostering an external ecosystem of developers to add value to a software platform. In addition, this is further evidence that as information technologies permeate just about every nook and cranny of the organization, CIOs can make valuable contributions throughout the business, including communications, marketing and branding.

In a 2007 tutorial, Transmedia Storytelling 101, Jenkins explains that “\transmedia stories are based not on individual characters or specific plots but rather complex fictional worlds which can sustain multiple interrelated characters and their stories. . . We are drawn to master what can be known about a world which always expands beyond our grasp.”

Let’s briefly explore how some of the collaborative innovation concepts from the IT industry could be of value in transmedia storytelling and branding.

First of all, we now have a wide variety of digital technologies and channels across which to develop the market strategy for our new offerings, in addition to the classic analog channels. But, as any good CIO will tell you, technology is an enabler, not the end in itself. The key to achieving your business objectives lies in the overall design of your applications. Similarly, the key to reaching your target audience is the story you tell about your brand and your offerings. No amount of technology can make up for a weak, garbled, or inconsistent set of messages and overall storyline. As we are bombarded with information and ads, we will just tune out the vast majority of them. The competition for our attention is more intense than ever.

The best way to draw in your audience is to engage them as collaborators and co-creators of your offerings and overall brand. Ideally, you want to turn them from passive recipients of information to engaged participants. Doing so is very tricky and takes many forms. Often it means creating the platforms that encourages your audience to express and share their opinions about your brand. Beyond that, it means actively encouraging the audience to help support each other in the use and understanding of your offerings.

This is not without risk. Your active social media audience may express opinions about your offerings you don’t like. They may take your brand in directions you never intended. But, they will likely do so with or without you. It is important to show the audience that you value constructive opinions and will seriously take them into account as you continue to evolve your offerings and your brand. Properly done, this can turn your most serious critics into your most important collaborators.

Beyond listening to comments and opinions, you want to develop an ecosystem of active co-creators. A number of companies have embraced the concept of user-centered innovation, and actively encourage and support their lead users to enhance their offerings and take them in unanticipated directions. After all, these lead users know exactly what they want, have the wherewithal to enhance the products or services on their own, and are usually quite happy to freely share their ideas with each other. Their needs tend to be at the leading edge of markets, where demand is small and uncertain. The only way to satisfy their special needs is for them to do their own innovation and solve their own problems. Moreover, their needs often foreshadow general demand in the marketplace, and can help companies get an early start in developing future offerings.

Perhaps nowhere is this process of collaborative innovation most evident than in the work of open source communities like Linux. These communities have developed a powerful commons-based peer-production approach that is particularly suitable to our digital, networked world. Open source communities will sometimes develop offerings that might compete with the existing products of established companies. However, it is important for companies to find ways of leveraging the talent and passion that is often found in such communities by partnering in their efforts.

Transmedia also brings to mind the notion of openapplication platforms, another powerful concept in the IT industry. Platforms can be proprietary to a vendor or operated by a consortium of vendors, an industry organization or an open community. Competing on the basis of platforms is very different than competing on the basis of a single product or service.

The key objective of an open platform is to build an external ecosystem of developers that generate complementary innovations and thus enrich the platform. To do so, the application platform should provide services, tools and interfaces to make it much easier for lots of people to build applications or apps on the platform. If properly done, the overall value of the platform is far bigger than what a single company could have accomplished on its own.

Given our fast changing, competitive world, I believe that the lessons of the IT industry will apply to the wider marketplace. This will require a major cultural change on the part of companies, from jealously controlling every aspect of their products, services and brands, to embracing collaborative innovation with partners, clients, and co-creators in general. Companies that successfully embrace the technologies, processes and culture of collaborative innovation will have a major advantage in becoming leaders in their industry.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger is a former vice-president of technical strategy and innovation atIBM . He is a strategic advisor to Citigroup and is a regular contributor to CIO Journal.

Comments (1 of 1)

It is of particular interest to me because I have credits as an author, feature-film screenwriter & stills photographer, etc, and am now a Social Media & PR Consultant for a Canadian digital branding company, iNexxus.

As much as I enjoy solo writing projects, collaborative ones are more enjoyable.

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